A NEW KIND OF WAR: A REPORT AND ANALYSIS
ON THE
U.S. CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI
OCCUPATION’S
WEST COAST PLANNING
CONFERENCE SEPT. 19-21, 2014
By Lee
Kaplan
A New Kind of War on Israel and the Jews Just Took
Place at BDS Conference in San Diego: Something To Be Afraid Of
By Lee Kaplan
I attended undercover the west coast national
planning conference of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation last
September 19-21 in San Diego, California. The US Campaign is, in fact, the
International Solidarity Movement
,
sometimes known as Palsolidarity, having been renamed and repackaged to serve
as the main nerve center for the Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel in the United States.
Over
400
groups
statewide dedicated to bringing down the Jewish
state were represented.
A repetitive theme of this event was that truth was
irrelevant if it stood in the way of destroying Israel or interfered with the
BDS movement’s goals. Lying by omission was a favored tactic that presented
just enough information to convey a false impression without telling the whole
truth or story at this event. Where this tactic failed, outright lying was the
method of the day.
Deconstructing the truth about Israel and its
irredentist terrorist neighbors like Hamas to fool an unknowing American public
was the main goal and, in terms of training new legions to go out and do that,
the event was successful. This wasn’t about peace, but about de-legitimizing
Israel to strengthen Hamas, nor was it about academic freedom or accurate
scholasticism as it tried to suggest it was.
What also distinguished this planning event over
previous years was that of the approximately 350 individual attendees and
leaders, at least half were disaffected “Jews” who were dedicated to
discrediting American Jewish and Christian institutions that support a Jewish
state. The Arab front group
Jewish
Voice for Peace
and the Jewish anti-Zionist Network
were prominent promoters of schemes and propaganda working alongside Arab
groups and BDS leaders
to devise “direct
actions” and other methods of supporting Hamas and Palestinian terrorist goals
under the guise of doing “humanitarian work” and fighting an imaginary
“apartheid” and “genocide.” Such atrocities are allegedly perpetrated by
Israeli and American Jewish groups
against “innocent” Arabs according to the conference.
A few radical homosexuals, some Jewish, also
attended the event from Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) to lend
support to Arab irredentist goals despite the Arab world’s persecution of gays.
At no time during the three day event was the idea
of “peace” used in any context where Israel’s survival as being part of a two
state solution conveyed. Instead, assorted student leaders from the Students
for Justice in Palestine, assorted Arab and U.S. academics, a large contingent
of retirees and even some Christian pastors all gathered to find out how best
to boycott the Jews and de-legitimize Israel. Only here the word “Jew” was
substituted with the word “Zionist”, followed by a plethora of false
accusations, stale communist revolutionary slogans and assorted pseudo-academic
anti-colonialist rhetoric so popular on college campuses. “Racism” was also
mentioned frequently while advocating racism against Jews in Israel as part of
the program.
Hamas was scarcely
mentioned, nor terrorism unless the words “Israeli terrorism” were used.
Rockets being fired into Israel from Gaza were also not mentioned, save one
remark from
attorney Marjorie Cohn from
the National Lawyers Guild who spoke about what she termed the “one single
little rocket” that was fired on Israel from Gaza (there were actually over
3,000 and many Israelis, even Arabs, were killed).
Terrorist Enablers Led the Charge
The conference began on a Friday night with a panel
that featured Rahim Kurwa of the UCLA Students for Justice in Palestine chapter;
Rabab Abdulhadi, an Ethnic Studies “scholar”
who is really more of an activist from San Francisco State University; Bill
Mullen from the American Studies Association; and Marjorie Cohn from the
National Lawyers Guild.
Kurwa introduced the audience to the event: “For what
promises to be an amazing weekend of education and organization in solidarity
work in the Palestinian struggle for liberation,” and said the event would
serve for “the refreshing of Palestinian solidarity activism.”
He recounted changes in the BDS Movement from
2009, 2010 and 2012 to 2014 today. In 2009, he said, “Professor William Robinson
at UC Santa Barbara was called to task for using his university
website
to promote boycotting Israel outside his field of study and objections were
raised then by Jewish groups.” Robinson managed to weather the campaign when
the University decided he could do so as part of “academic freedom,” Kurwa
said. Part of Robinson’s campaign back then, which Kurwa didn’t discuss, was
his use of photos of Palestinian “victims” of Israeli “atrocities” placed
alongside photos from the Holocaust. In fact, many of the photos of alleged
Palestinian “victims” were actually photos of Israelis being beaten by Israeli
police as they were deported from their homes in the West Bank, or staged
scenes of Arabs that had no comparison with the Holocaust despite claims to the
contrary:
Kurwa
declared also that in 2009 that Jewish groups had attacked UCLA’s Center for
Near East Studies as being biased against Israel particularly during Operation
Cast Lead in Gaza. He declared these attacks as being engineered solely because
the Jewish groups didn’t like the message rather than being due to academic
bias or propaganda. “What they are doing today,” he said, “is asking for the
same thing they asked for five years ago: for Middle East studies to stop
producing scholarship.”
He went on to
describe the
disruption
of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine by UC Irvine’s Muslim
Students Association and some Students for Justice in Palestine as a “brief
disruption” (the event was closed down) that the Orange County district
attorney misrepresented from “an exercise in free speech to an illegal
conspiratorial act” (a conspiracy was proven about the event
in court
)
and various chapters of the SJP considered the action as part of a valid new
system of “disrupting pro-Palestinian speakers throughout the UC system so they
could not speak.” Kurwa accused the Orange County District Attorney of
“twisting the law.”
Kurwa also alluded to the case of Palestinian
activist Rasmea Odeh in Chicago who is currently facing deportation
hearings due to what he again termed
“twisting” of immigration laws to punish her for being pro-Palestinian. He
conveniently ignored the fact that Odeh murdered two men in a supermarket
bombing in Israel in 1989 for which she was sentenced to twenty years in prison
but paroled by Israel after ten. Odeh later lied on her entry papers to the
United States saying she had never been convicted of a felony. To avoid the
deportation, Odeh and her supporters fabricated claims of torture while she was
in prison in Israel, and of her father being brought to her cell in front of 45
Israeli policemen and being forced to disrobe in front of her and coerced to
rape her in front of everyone. This is her argument for not being deported and
it is a lie, especially since people do not realize that if Odeh’s deportation
orders go through, she would not be sent back to Israel but to Jordan, the
country she left from to go to the United States and where she lived after her
parole. Odeh’s plight was a recurring cause celebre at this conference to try
and get her deportation canceled.
Flashing forward to the more current events, Kurwa
also bemoaned the recent sacking of Professor Stephen Salaita
from the University of Illinois at
Champlain
because of his outspoken
support for Palestine which Kurwa also deemed an abuse of academic freedom.
Salaita was in fact sacked before he begin a term at that university after it
was determined he had made
multiple
anti-Semitic public remarks against Jews
and declared Israel an
“apartheid state” when it is in fact the only state in the Middle East that
does not practice apartheid. Given that the entire conference was based on
half-truths and at times outright lies to forward its destroy- Israel- at- all
-costs agenda,
it’s not much of a
surprise that support for Salaita would be such a strong issue also at this
event. The attendees were encouraged by Kurwa, “to find Professor Salaita a job
someplace, somehow, so he could continue his work” and he, too, was named a
cause celebre for those in attendance.
Next up to speak was Rabab Abdulhadi of SFSU.
Abdulahdi, as a Professor of Ethnic Studies has had a career as a
pro-Palestinian activist against Israel and the US on the California taxpayer’s
dime and recently came under criticism for spending $7,000 of California tax
dollars on a trip to the Middle East to “show solidarity” and meet with
PFLP
terrorist Laila Khaled
. Khaled was one of the first
terrorists to start airplane hijacking and is under house arrest in Jordan.
Abdulhadi devoted part of her speech to attacking
AMCHA and Stand With Us campus, two Pro-Israel advocacy groups that exposed
Abdulhadi’s expenditures and statements in support of groups like Hamas. She
thanked the conference organizers for “...the amazing support they have shown
me after I have been attacked by the AMCHA Initiative campaign. It could not
have happened without you.” Abdulhadi accused such groups of violating
“academic freedom” and her right to free speech.
Abdulhadi complained of what she termed a
“collection of attacks” that she alleged were from pro-Israel groups during the
war on Gaza “and what this means to us in terms of repression.”
Citing attacks on “pro-Palestinian students and
myself” she alleged took place not only at San Francisco State, she elaborated
a list of other colleges to include “UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, San Jose State,
UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Vermont, Northeastern, Northwestern,
University of Michigan, NYU, Brooklyn College and elsewhere...” that she said
were conducted by AMCHA, Stand With Us, Simon Wiesenthal and other pro-Jewish
groups as being further examples of “a campaign of repression” and “denials of
academic freedom.”
She and the other speakers on the panel scoffed at
requests by such pro-Israel groups for “civility” from pro-Palestinian and BDS
groups on campuses, such requests deemed as being “merely attempts to stifle
debate.”
This flew in the face of
numerous
physical
attacks
on pro-Israel students, even non-Jews, across the
country by BDS groups.
She continued, “These attacks [by pro-Israel groups]
are part of a very long history of repression and I’d like to send some as old
as myself back to the
Los
Angeles 8
who were attacked by President Bush who then failed
in trying to intimidate debate.” The LA 8 were prosecuted over twenty years ago
for deportations after the FBI found fundraising and connections from them to
the PFLP terrorist group, the same one Leila Khaled belongs to. Abdulhadi then
said the government “...wanted to build internment camps for the citizens of 7
Arab countries and Iran and put people like the Japanese during World War II in
them.”
Abdulhadi went on to praise the current SFSU
President who she maintained in private had assured her he would never let
groups like AMCHA or Stand with Us deny her “academic freedom”
whereas “...the previous president had sought
to control my behavior.” She continued adamantly, “I have a right to spend
public tax dollars to teach social justice if I want to.”
She then went into a litany of revolutionary dialog,
declaring Israel guilty of colonialism, an example of “white settlers taking
advantage of an indigenous population.” She even included the situation in
Ferguson as an example of where what the termed the indigenous black population
was being abused by “the white settler community and the police department”—a
rather silly statement.
Incredibly, she
also said the police officer who slew Michael Brown had
been trained by Israel ( a complete lie) and
complained about the “militarization” of the police “as a way of taking
advantage of the haves and have- nots.”
She extended this idea to the recent war in Gaza as
an example of the “haves” (Israel) taking advantage of the “have-nots” (the
Palestinians). But then she claimed the Palestinians would rather live under
bombardment by the Israelis and “stand tall” than capitulate to the Israeli
government and she predicted a Third Intifada in the near future. She alluded
to Palestinian cooperation with the ANC in fighting South African apartheid
from SFSU in the 80’s
(Jewish students
did this also back then) and complained pointedly about the arrest of
Sami al-Arian
who was the US head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 2001, as if this was some
form of oppression (Al-Arian was responsible for the deaths of over 100 people
including some Americans through terrorist attacks).
She attributed these events to racism by the
“Zionists.” She declared in spite of setbacks like the war in Gaza and against
BDS that their movement “...is more legitimate today for Palestinians than it
ever was.” Abdulhadi, who went to the Middle East to show “solidarity” with a
PFLP terrorist and consistently spoke of Palestinians aligning themselves with
the likes of Hamas, concluded her speech by saying the BDS movement that day
would mean “ ‘Never Again’ for anyone,” referring to Jewish resolve against
another Holocaust. Considering her support for groups and individuals whose
charter and verbiage call for the annihilation of all world Jewry, her
concluding remarks were surreal.
The evening concluded with Marjorie Cohn of the
National Lawyers Guild, who, in addition to her shoddy math about rocket
attacks on Israel, gave a long lecture on how BDS and anti-Israel advocates on
campus could preserve their right to speak on campus, explaining what was legal
and what was not legal. A pamphlet was also circulated to everyone in
attendance. It was mentioned that some campuses had tried to “silence” pro-Palestinian
speakers and she explained the law to everyone to see they would not be “silenced.”
She mentioned earlier in the evening that she and the NLG were excoriated by
Alan Dershowitz, an Israel supporter, for dishonesty and use of the law to
promote BDS in America . She stated that she was very proud of Dershowitz’s
vituperation against her. “I took it as a badge of honor,” she said.
Next up was Bill Mullen, a history professor
and
faculty
advisor to SJP at Purdue. Mullen spoke about the Academic Studies
Association’s (ASA’s) recent vote to boycott Israeli academics and programs.
Mullen was highly critical and derisive of pro-Israel groups who opposed this,
citing his own interpretation of academic freedom. According to Mullen, such opposition
groups called for “civility” in academia when it came to discussing the
Israel-Palestine conflict, Mullen declaring such requests an attempt to control
unpopular ideas from the pro-Palestinian camp that would hinder critical
thinking. Actually, such “civility” is supposed to mean not lying about Israeli
history and actions (a frequent tactic at this conference also) or condoning
terrorist groups
and their
tactics (such as defining terrorism as
“legitimate resistance.”). Mullen further suggested it referred only to
legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies and was just an effort to
indoctrinate students from learning for themselves. He didn’t bother to mention
that the vote and lobbying for this boycott activity in the ASA was carried out
by
Noura
Erekat
and some Palestinian plants along with some 80 Arab
professors in the ASA who promote BDS and whose sole purpose of being there was
to be a stacked deck to push for a boycott of Israeli institutions and to do so
by misrepresentation if need be. Noura Erekat is the niece Saeb Erekat,
Arafat’s second-in-command of the PLO and no slouch when it comes to lying
about Israel committing atrocities against Arabs (Saeb claimed, for example,
that the entire city of Jenin and its Arab population were wiped out by Israel;
as a result he was banned from several television stations for doing so). In
keeping with the tactic of lying by omission, Mullen failed to point out that boycotting
Israeli academics and professors, rather than being an exercise in academic
freedom was in fact a way to deny academic freedom to the pro-Israel camp by
silencing anything they had to say and preventing them from proving when the
BDS advocates in the ASA were lying. Documentation from the US Campaign who
staged this conference, documentation that is generally fraudulent or leaves
out details, was used as a basis for
a
petition to boycott Israel from within the ASA.
The evening concluded with Marjorie Cohn of the
National Lawyers Guild, who, in addition to her shoddy math about rocket attacks
on Israel, gave a long lecture on how BDS and anti-Israel advocates on campus
could preserve their right to speak on campus, explaining what was legal and
what was not legal. A pamphlet was also circulated to everyone in attendance.
It was mentioned that some campuses had tried to “silence” pro-Palestinian
speakers and she explained the law to everyone to see they would not be
“silenced.” She mentioned earlier in the evening that she and the NLG were excoriated
by Alan Desrhowitz, an Israel supporter, for dishonesty and use of the law to
promote BDS in America . She stated that she was very proud of Dershowitz’s
vituperation against her. “I took it as a badge of honor,” she said.
THE BREAKOUT AND
PLANNING SESSIONS
Saturday was devoted to revolving sessions that
covered different planning and strategies to promote BDS against Israel in the
United States.
The morning session was titled Mainstreaming BDS
& Connecting Struggles and featured several speakers, but notably Suhad
Khatib from the US Campaign and Gabriel Schivone, a “youth organizer” with
UNIDOS intelligence-based ethnic studies group in Tucson, AZ.
This plenary was to introduce a recurring
theme throughout the conference that the BDS movement can find greater numbers
and alliances by reaching out in cooperation with other activist groups,
particularly ones that are anti-U.S. and see America as a colonialist
oppressor. It was pointed out, for example, that Elbit systems, an Israeli
company held the contract for surveillance technology along the U.S.-Mexican
border and also declared an example of the militarization of police and
immigration forces in the United States.
An example of a synergistic approach to BDS was
suggested utilizing the people from both BDS and immigration groups would be to
coordinate riots as like occur every Friday in the villages in the West Bank in
the Holy Land to happen at the same time with similar ones at the U.S.-Mexican
border to point out the need for BDS.
G48, a British firm that provided prison services in Israel, was said to
have pulled out of Israel as a result of the BDS movement tying itself to
various “social justice” groups in the UK. Likewise, the shooting of Michael
Brown in Ferguson was cited as another opportunity to promote BDS against
Israel in the United States and that ‘similar tactics’ could be used to justify
violence, including the “dehumanization of victims and corporate media
distortions of reality”. It was claimed again that a member of the St. Louis
County Police Department who had killed Michael
Brown had trained in Israel in the past, so as to tie Israeli complicity
into the Brown shooting. Nobody mentioned that Brown was shot by an officer from
the Ferguson police department who had nothing to do with Israel and Michael
Brown was not shot by anyone in the St. Louis County Police Department. Not to
be deterred by the truth, a week after this conference, an email went out from
the US Campaign and from its national leader, Anna Baltzer, calling for a
“Palestinian contingent” to be sent to Ferguson to try and make the rioting and
Brown killing part of the BDS agenda and connecting it to work for “Palestinian
rights” by linking it with other movements for justice, even the environment. Attendees
were told how to approach these environmental or racial groups and convince
them the BDS movement would help them and that both movements should join
together in teamwork to “fight oppression”.
As an example, the Block the Boats campaign against
the Zim corporation was mentioned, because it got several longshoremen to
refuse to unload the Israeli cargo ships for four days in two major ports. It
was alleged the workers lost their income for those days because they believed
they were fighting apartheid and helping the human rights of the Palestinians.
The fact that Israel is the only state in the Middle East that does NOT
practice apartheid and extends full civil rights to all its Arab citizens would
be unknown to the stevedores. This is an example why lying by omission is so
successful.
It is easy to imagine why the BDS advocates are able
to do this.
Since they have a number of
“Jews” who are active in their movement, they can approach a union local
alongside some union members who may be invited along with and belong to socialist
action groups who can
introduce them to
each other such as
International
ANSWER
. They tell the other union workers that Israel is
an apartheid state like South Africa was in the 1980’s (these union locals were
involved in fighting apartheid in South Africa back then). They regale the current
membership with tales of Israeli atrocities, such as attacks on children or lie
to them about Arabs being discriminated against in Israel like it used to be in
South Africa. It’s not true, but they convince the workers to forego some days
of work to help the Palestinian cause and for “human rights”. In turn, the pro-Palestinian
activists promise to turn out for any union protests or actions where they
might be needed.
Conference attendees
were told to look beyond their own immediate needs as Palestinian activists to
understand and express sympathy for these other social justice movements, to
suggest a unity in fighting oppression. By having so-called “Jews” advocating
to boycott other Jews in Israel because they are allegedly “oppressing” an Arab
minority then doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The hardcore unionists who may belong to communist-inspired union groups
or socialist action leagues are more than willing to go along.
The next seminar was titled “Exposing the 1% &
Israel’s Agenda to Silence Criticism & Promote Anti-Muslim & Anti-Arab
Racism; Organizing Against the Backlash In Ways to Strengthen Our Movement,
Resident Joint Struggle, and Weaken Our Opposition.” The two key speakers at
this event
were “Jews” who claimed to
represent the 98% or the “poor”, the rest of “us” as were allegedly represented
at the Occupy Movement events of last year in the US. The presentation was led
by Max Geller , the leader of the Northeastern University chapter of the
Students for Justice in Palestine and Sara Kershnar, founder of the “
International Jewish Anti-Zionist
Network.
”
Geller, in keeping with the tactic of lying by
omission, introduced himself as an oppressed Jewish student who was briefly
expelled from Northeastern University merely for demonstrating on behalf of the
poor oppressed Palestinians. He was reinstated after his university was sued by
the ACLU. The uninitiated might believe he was unfairly treated. What he never
told his audience was that he was expelled by Northeastern after he had posed
for photographs with a machine gun in support of Palestinian terrorist groups
in the West Bank. The University felt this was conduct unbecoming one of their
students. The ACLU argued it was merely an exercise in free speech. Not wishing
to be drawn into an expensive drawn out lawsuit he was readmitted by the
University. “Can someone take a photograph of me to show my mother?, he asked
from the podium, clearly proud to be the center of attention, the token Jew
leading the charge against the Jews in the Middle East. Sara Kershnar followed
him and gave a presentation that outlined an interview of the national funding
sources for pro-Israel activism in the United States from top to bottom that
she said were well-funded to smear and lie about the Palestinian movement. She
placed on a board a list of Jewish philanthropies such as the Koret Foundation,
the Koch Brothers and others, about twelve of them, that she said provide the
bulk of the funding, “...the 1%” she claimed. Then she presented a secondary
list that began with Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum, the Israel Project
and Stand With Us that she said were doled out funds to distribute on lower
levels to deal with Palestinian activism. Motioning to her audience she said “most
of you as individuals had no doubt on a personal level been the targets of such
funding by such groups as Stand With Us.” They concluded with a discussion on
how to expose these organizations to the public as being behind the “backlash”
against BDS and existing to promote the oppression of the disadvantaged the BDS
movement was allegedly protecting.
Thus, starving the Jews out in the Middle East
through boycotts and divestments is something these activists sought to promote
“justice” both on and off campus in America. At the same time, exposing the
wealthy financial support behind the pro-Israel movement to the public was one
way they sought to show who the “exploiters” are--rich Jews and their
institutions. While nobody said this directly, my initial interpretation of
this event was the organizers wanted to show the attendees how those “rich Jews,”
the 1%, are behind the alleged oppression of the poor Palestinians and other
groups needing “social justice.” This way, other social justice movements in
the United States could be convinced it was their duty to stop them by
supporting the Palestinian cause through BDS. As mentioned, no mention was made
of Hamas and the millions of dollars its leadership has stolen in foreign aid
money even from its own people. In other words, Gazans are to be the victims of
the “rich Jews,” so much so that of the 1% per cent who are Jews even some
among them as at this conference, are supporting BDS.
The next session was a meeting of the Students for
Justice (
SJP
)
in Palestine-West
The SJP is said to be on over 80 campuses in the
United States. In the past, these chapters usually worked independently of each
other with no centralized control. Now the SJP has created both a
West Coast
central headquarters as well as a
National
headquarters to coordinate these groups so actions can happen simultaneously
across the country and information and resources can be shared and funds
raised. Divestment would be the main strategy of SJP chapters working the BDS
movement on their campuses. This convention section allowed SJP students to
meet each other and network, and tied in with another session titled “Resisting
the McCarthysim on Campus: Know Your Rights and Understanding Trends in
Palestinian Organizing. Led by Liz Jackson, of
Palestine Legal Support
,
a new legal arm set up to defend BDS and anti-Israel activism on campuses that
used to be done mainly by the National Lawyers Guild and sometimes the ACLU.
The other spokespeople were from the UCLA SJP and as usual one “Jewish”
representative from the Jewish Voice for Peace, a largely Marxist front group
that strongly supports BDS against Israel. This session declared that
Palestinian free speech was under attack, unfairly, on many campuses merely for
criticizing Israel. To hear it told at this event, there are no mock
check